Sunday, March 4, 2012

It's hard to believe that an actress like Paula Prentiss is celebrating her 74th birthday today. Then again, Prentiss did start her Hollywood career back in 1960 with Where the Boys Are. I have vague memories of her being in th1 1962 film The Horizontal Lieutenant, when it showed up decades ago as one of the movies in the SFM Holiday Network, which of course wasn't really a network. I'm trying to remember some of the other films that I would have seen as part of that movie package. I think they had Danny Kaye's Hans Christian Andersen, but it's a long time ago for me to remember and it's not as though I was paying attention to those movies.

The picture above is one I'm pretty certain is from The Stepford Wives, where she played the best friend of Katharine Ross. Prentiss gets one of the great scenes in the movie when, after Ross stabs her, she just keeps trying to fill the coffee filter with more coffee, oblivious to what's happened to her. (Of course, if you've seen the movie, you know why she's oblivious.) Prentiss also had a smallish role in another movie with a conspiracy theory theme, that being The Parallax View, in which she plays a journalist who saw an assassination several years back and is now certain that people are out to get her. She's hysterical in the movie, but just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that there aren't people out to get you.